NPR. This is The Indicator from Planet Money.
I'm Darian Woods.
And I'm Waylon Wong.
We have seen a lot of major natural disasters in the U.S. in the last couple of years.
In 2024 alone, there were Hurricanes Milton and Helene,
plus tornadoes in the central and southeastern parts of the country.
And these disasters we're talking about all shared something in common.
They all hit at least $1 billion in costs or damages.
And we know this
because the federal government tabulated the economic impact of these extreme events.
So not quite a decade ago, an inflection point in terms of the frequency, the diversity,
and the magnitude and the cost of these extremes just went to another level and generally stayed at that level.
That's Adam Smith, not the economist, a climatologist.
It had a Scottish accent if he was.
Oh yeah, good catch, Darian.
This Adam Smith spearheaded something called the Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters Database of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
or NOAA.
NOAA is well known for its sophisticated weather forecasting,
but it also calculated the cost of climate disasters going back to 1980.
This was information that state and local governments used for budgeting and planning.